1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for spatial analysis of a physical quantity whose spatial values are represented by respective measurement pulses whose order in time is representative of those values.
To be more precise, the invention concerns the analysis of information represented by analog signals produced by the cells of a sensor responsive to the local evolution of the physical quantity in a given space.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the context of the technology evoked briefly hereinabove, it is already known in the art, in order to reduce the quantity of information from a sensor of this kind and thus to simplify its analysis, to submit the signals generated by the cells of the sensor to a process of ordering in time by means of turning filters. This method classifies the information obtained by creating pulses whose position in time reflects the pertinence of the information; the pulses arriving earliest code the most pertinent information.
A particularly interesting application of this time order concept can be found in the domain of character recognition in which the stream of analog signals is produced by a series of photosensitive “pixels”, for example, each pixel forming one of the cells of the sensor. It has been shown that in this case recognition can be effected using only a small proportion of the information contained in the image captured by the sensor. The processing of the information can be simplified in this way, and the power consumption of the circuits of the sensor reduced accordingly.
However, it will be noted that this concept may be applied whenever an observed phenomenon is reflected in the spatial evolution of a physical quantity, which evolution is represented by analog signals whose information content must be exploited.